Hiroshi Okuda, Former Toyota President and First Keidanren Chairman, Dies at 93
# Hiroshi Okuda# Toyota# Keidanren
Key Points
- Hiroshi Okuda, former president of Toyota Motor, died on the 8th at the age of 93.
- He also served as the first chairman of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren).
- Okuda was a leading voice of Japanese industry from the late 1990s into the 2000s.
Analysis
Okuda belongs to the generation of executives who pushed Toyota from domestic leader to global operator, and he led Keidanren at a time when Japanese business had unusual weight in policy debate. His tenure as the federation's first chairman coincided with a long stretch of weak growth and business-led pressure for labour and tax reform, and the pattern of dialogue between industry and government from those years still shapes how the two sides talk today.